Tag: Conditional Access

This article is the last part of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 2: What is Conditional Access?
Conditional Access demystified, part 3: How does Conditional Access work?
Conditional Access demystified, part 4: Designing a Conditional Access strategy
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 6: Troubleshooting Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 7: Modifying Conditional Access to suit your special needs

In the last part of this series I will summarize some of the sources I used for writing this series of articles.

This article is part 7 of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 2: What is Conditional Access?
Conditional Access demystified, part 3: How does Conditional Access work?
Conditional Access demystified, part 4: Designing a Conditional Access strategy
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 6: Troubleshooting Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 8: Resources and further references

When you want to integrate other products into your Conditional Access environment you can use “Custom controls” to include products from other vendors into your Conditional Access conditions. If a custom control is used the browser is redirected to the external service, performs any required authentication or validation activities, and is then redirected back to Azure Active Directory. If the user was successfully authenticated or validated, the user continues in the Conditional Access flow. More information and some samples can be found here: Azure AD + 3rd party MFA = Azure AD Custom Controls – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/cbernier/2017/10/16/azure-ad-3rd-party-mfa-azure-ad-custom-controls/. This feature is still in preview but very promising for 3rd party vendors who want to integrate with Conditional Access.

This article is part 6 of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 2: What is Conditional Access?
Conditional Access demystified, part 3: How does Conditional Access work?
Conditional Access demystified, part 4: Designing a Conditional Access strategy
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 7: Modifying Conditional Access to suit your special needs
Conditional Access demystified, part 8: Resources and further references

In this part of the series we will go into more detail on where we can find information which can help us to troubleshoot Conditional Access policies.

This article is part 4 of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 2: What is Conditional Access?
Conditional Access demystified, part 3: How does Conditional Access work?
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 6: Troubleshooting Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 7: Modifying Conditional Access to suit your special needs
Conditional Access demystified, part 8: Resources and further references

When designing a Conditional Access strategy for a customer we first need to start with an inventory of the environment, in the most ideal situation you would design and implement conditional access in a green field scenario, but I for sure never had that luxury before so it’s better to assume that the customer is already using cloud apps and wants to implement conditional access as an security measure.

This article is part 3 of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 2: What is Conditional Access?
Conditional Access demystified, part 4: Designing a Conditional Access strategy
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access

Conditional Access demystified, part 6: Troubleshooting Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 7: Modifying Conditional Access to suit your special needs
Conditional Access demystified, part 8: Resources and further references

Microsoft explains Conditional Access in the following way. Conditional Access consists of access scenario’s called Conditional Access policies. An Conditional Access policy follows the following pattern:

“When this happens” defines the reason for triggering your policy. This reason is characterized by a group of conditions that have been satisfied. With “Then do this” you define how users can access your cloud apps.

Technically this is translated to Conditions (When this happens) and Access controls (Then do this)

This article is part 2 of a series, for which the following articles are available:

Conditional Access demystified, part 1: Introduction
Conditional Access demystified, part 3: How does Conditional Access work?
Conditional Access demystified, part 4: Designing a Conditional Access strategy
Conditional Access demystified, part 5: Implementing Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 6: Troubleshooting Conditional Access
Conditional Access demystified, part 7: Modifying Conditional Access to suit your special needs
Conditional Access demystified, part 8: Resources and further references

Microsoft describes Conditional Access as followed: “With Conditional Access, you can implement automated access control decisions for accessing your cloud apps that are based on conditions.” and “Conditional Access policies are enforced after the first-factor authentication has been completed. Therefore, Conditional Access is not intended as a first line defense for scenarios like denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, but can utilize signals from these events (e.g. the sign-in risk level, location of the request, and so on) to determine access.”

The way I see it, the best way to explain what Conditional Access does, is by making the comparison to a firewall. A firewall determines what traffic can access your resources, under what circumstances and Conditional Access sort of does the same. Conditional Access describes under what circumstances users can access your cloud applications.